Truist has unveiled its Innovation and Technology Center, a research- and client collaboration-focused facility located at the bank’s Charlotte, N.C., headquarters.

The 100,000-square-foot space is $544 billion Truist’s latest banking automation and innovation play, with technology research hubs and collaborative workspaces for the bank’s technologists, alongside a client contact center.

The initiative was a vision from “Day One” when BB&T and SunTrust merged to create Truist in 2019, Ken Meyer, divisional chief information and experience officer, told Bank Automation News. Meyer played a key role in the center’s development, working with engineers and architects to get the plan off the ground.

“When the announcement was made about the merger, a big portion was about leaning into innovation and thinking about how technology and touch can redefine what trust means for 2022 and beyond,” Meyer said. “Over the last year and a half or so, I was really co-leading the design in the delivery of the physical space.”

Truist plans to hire technologists and developers to work with client agents to present real-time feedback at the contact center, he said.

“We’re hiring contact center agents to better understand how our clients are using our experiences — specifically, a lot of our digital experiences,” Meyer said. “The teams that are working on the floor, building those experiences, can get real-time feedback from clients that are not actually present.”

While providing a technology-centric hub for client-facing bank operations, the center will also allow Truist to develop research for innovative technologies and services, ranging from cloud capabilities to quantum computing. AWS, Verizon and no-code software company Unqork collaborate with Truist on research. But for Truist, all roads lead back to an automated client journey.

“We’ve got teams from all over the place,” Meyer said. “It’s not just developers or designers or product folks. You’ve got folks from risk and audit. It’s really a full stack type of an approach focused on client experience.”

TD Workshop

Truist is not the only bank to go live with a new technology center; TD Bank announced earlier this month the launch of TD Workshop, a Philadelphia-based hybrid branch and research center. Facilitating live research and insights creates palpable opportunity for TD Bank, Steve Turley, TD Bank head of consumer distribution planning, strategy and innovation, told BAN.

“It’s [TD Workshop] going to allow us to provide that physical space for our colleagues, to be able to create and iterate on ways to respond to changing customer needs,” Turley said. “The feedback and the insights we get is going to help us inform how we evolve our interaction model, our store formats, and the general financial services and products that we offer.”

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